8 replies so far

Not sure what planer you have but one thing I read in my manual is to make sure the wheel lock is tightened before planing. Well, I always tightened mine down on my old ridgid planer but noticed it didn’t feel really tight. I would get snipe on occasion, and then it got worse and worse. What I did was take the hand wheel off and re-indexed the lock lever and now it gets real tight and has pretty much eliminated snipe all together. Some times it does happen but it is far less dramatic.

Another thing that can help is the infeed/outfeed tables. If you raise them just a bit, it might help as well.

My dewalt dw733 used to produce a snipe until I raised the outfeed table to be a little higher than the center table. I also made an auxiliary planer table (just a sheet of melamine with a cleat to keep it from being pulled through) and gave it a good waxing. That along with making sure your cutterhead lock is engaged should eliminate most if not all snipe.

You can also use two sided tape and add 1/4 inch thick sticks to the outside of the board to be planed. Just extend the sticks 3-4 inches beyond the end of the board. This works for my Grizzly every time. Should work on any planer.

Adding long infeed and outfeed tables (or feel rollers) works forthe moving-head planers (most portable models). The fixedhead planers I’ve used have had less of a problem with snipe, but that doesn’t mean that lighter-weight fixed head models don’t do it.

I’m not a fan of the lunchbox planers. I don’t think they’re builtto last and they are very noisy. In the end though, the modelswith a cutterhead lock seem to to better with snipe than themodels without.

You can mitigate snipe a bit by feeding stock at an angle. Anadded benefit is you distribute wear on your planer knives a bitmore evenly.

I have a Ryobi AP1301, which is kind of famous for sniping due to lack of infeed / outfeed tables. If I lift up on th end of the board opposite of where it goes in, and then again where it comes out, so that the feed rollers don’t have a chance to bite in to unsupported wood, the snipe goes away… Also feeding at a slight angle helps…

I got rid of most of my snipe by making sure I had an outfeed table too adequately support the stock as it comes out of the planer. On long boards, some little bit of snipe is almost unavoidable on most home shop planers. For that reason I cut my stock a little long and trim off the snipe.